Ross Thomas - The Fourth Durango

The rear car switched on its lights and left. Vines finished his handful of nuts, returned to the bed, picked up the novel and, sitting on the edge of the bed, finished it. But because the novel had failed to put him to sleep, he reached for the old standby remedy and poured almost three ounces of Jack Daniel’s into a water glass.

He drank it slowly, wondering as he often did on sleepless nights where he would be a year from now, presuming, of course, he told himself, that a year from now you’ll still be around.

He finished the whiskey, turned off the light and lay down. When he looked for the last time at his watch’s glowing dial it was a little past three and Jack Adair had still not returned to his room.

At a little past 9 A.M. on Sunday, July 3, Dixie Mansur kissed her husband good-byeand drove away in his white Rolls-Royce, heading south on U.S. 101 toward San Diego, where, Parvis Mansur believed, she planned to spend the holiday weekend with their friends, Mr. and Mrs. Reva Moussavvis.

Because of heavy holiday traffic, Dixie didn’t reach Ventura’s beachside Holiday Inn until a little past ten that morning. She removed an overnight bag, locked the white Rolls and checked into a prepaid room that had been reserved for her under the name of Joyce Mellon.

Once in the room she tossed the overnight bag on one bed, sat down on the other, picked up the phone and tapped out the three numbers of another room in the hotel. When a man’s voice answered with a hello, she said, “You ready?” After the man replied he was, she said she would be right down.

Dixie Mansur’s room was 607 and the man’s room was 505. She went down the stairs, along the corridor and knocked at the door. It was opened by Theodore Contraire, who sometimes wore a priest’s outfit, sometimes a plumber’s, and now wore a pale blue smock that could have belonged to either a pharmacist or a hairdresser.

Once Dixie was inside the room and the door was closed, the five-foot-one Contraire reached up, grabbed her by the shoulders and forced her head down to his so he could mash their lips together in a long, long kiss that entailed a lot of wet tongue work.

The kiss ended as abruptly as it began. Contraire wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, “We’re running a little late.”

“I had to fuck Parvis before I could leave.”

“Over here,” he said, indicating a long low dresser with a large mirror. She sat down on a padded bench and Contraire switched on the four lights he had rigged up to illuminate the mirror.

Staring at herself, Dixie said, “Christ, I look awful.”

“You’re gonna look even worse,” he said. “Older. Maybe ten years older. I’m gonna start with the contacts. Here.”

He handed her a small plastic case. She removed the contact lenses from it and inserted them quickly.

“Been practicing,” he said with grudging approval.

“All week.”

“Okay, now you got brown eyes instead of blue.”

“I like blue better.”

“Not with dark brown hair, you don’t.” Contraire stuck four bobby pins in his mouth, pulled Dixie’s blond hair back and expertly pinned it into a smooth helmet. He picked up a shoulder-length brown wig from the dresser, used a brush on it and carefully fitted it to her head.

After inspecting his handiwork with obvious satisfaction, he picked up a squat white bottle with no label, removed its cap, poured a small amount of thick beige liquid onto his fingertips and began working it into her face and neck. “It takes two minutes, that’s all,” he said. When he finished, she had acquired a moderately deep tan.

Dixie inspected herself critically in the mirror. “I look different but not much older.”

Contraire, looking over her shoulder into the mirror, ran the thumb and forefinger of his right hand down the faint parenthetic lines that began at the base of Dixie’s nose and went to the corners of her mouth. “When you get older,” he said, “these get deeper. So here’s what we do.”

Using what appeared to be a well-sharpened eyebrow pencil, Contraire delicately increased the visibility of the two parenthetic lines. The results made Dixie say, “I’ll be damned.”

“Put these on,” Contraire said, handing her a wire-framed pair of green-tinted glasses whose lenses were only slightly larger than half-glasses. She put them on and they promptly slipped down her nose. She shoved them up. They slipped down again.

“When you’re talking to him, keep shoving ’em back up. It’ll drive him nuts.”

Dixie turned her head as far to the right as she could and still examine herself in the mirror. Turning her head to the left, she did the same. “I look almost forty with these dumb glasses.”

Contraire removed the top from a large jar of cold cream. “Okay,” he said. “Take it all off, then put it back on and let’s see how fast you can do it.”

She did it twice before he was satisfied. He placed the wig, the tinted glasses, the contact lenses and the cosmetics in a plain white paper shopping bag. From the pocket of his smock he took a sheaf of hundred-dollar bills bound with a red rubber band.

“Six thousand exactly,” he said, dropping it into the shopping bag.

“What about the map?” Dixie said.

He brought that out from the other pocket of his smock. It was hand-drawn on a sheet of plain white paper. Dixie studied it, nodded and said, “What kind of car?”

“Two-year-old black Cadillac Seville sedan.” He smiled, displaying the gray teeth. “Real conservative.” He stopped smiling and frowned, as if he had forgotten something. “What about your clothes?”

“I bought a frumpy summer suit at the Junior League thrift shop in Santa Barbara.”

“That oughta do.”

“Should I call him from here?”

“Christ, no. From a pay phone.”

“Don’t you want to hear my voice?”

Contraire grimaced, as if he had just been accused of negligence. “Sure I want to hear it. I was just about to ask you.”

“Here goes then,” Dixie said. “Hello, there. I’m Mrs. Nelson Wigmore? Kelly Vines’s cousin? And I’d like to find out if I can do something that’s really rotten?”

Contraire again nodded his approval. “Don’t forget those rising inflections. But it sounds pretty good-like about halfway between New Orleans and Mobile.”

“I practiced with a tape recorder.”

Contraire frowned again, as if trying to think of something else he had forgotten. Nothing apparently came to mind so he asked a question instead. “How’re B. D. and Sid and them taking it?”

“They still don’t know diddly. Except Sid did find out who Hazy was. Why’d you have to fix her anyway?”

“Why? Because you brought her in when we needed a photographer and she could’ve tied you in with me, that’s why. And after she saw me fix that cop from the back of the van, well, what’d you expect me to do except what I did?”

“You could’ve done something different.”

“You’re making it sound like I wanted to fix her, like I was dying to or something. Maybe you oughta know that by then Hazy and I had a nice little something going.”

“Fuck off, Teddy.”

“You fuck off, Dixie.”

It was often the way they said good-bye.

Dixie Mansur drove out of the Ventura Holiday Inn parking lot and two blocks farther on found a Texaco gas station with a bank of pay phones. She got out of the Rolls, locked it again, dropped her quarter and tapped out the eleven-digit number. When her call was answered, the operator cut in with instructions to deposit an additional $1.25 for three minutes. Dixie instead dropped in seven quarters.

After the quarters stopped clanging, the man’s voice on the phone again said, “Altoid Sanitarium.”